This paper proposes a novel active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) method with continuous trajectory optimization over a stochastic robot dynamics model. The problem is formalized as a stochastic optimal control over the continuous robot kinematic model to minimize a cost function that involves the covariance matrix of the landmark states. We tackle the problem by separately obtaining an open-loop control sequence subject to deterministic dynamics by iterative Covariance Regulation (iCR) and a closed-loop feedback control under stochastic robot and covariance dynamics by Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). The proposed optimization method captures the coupling between localization and mapping in predicting uncertainty evolution and synthesizes highly informative sensing trajectories. We demonstrate its performance in active landmark-based SLAM using relative-position measurements with a limited field of view.
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to achieve point goal navigation in a legged robot. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully exploit this capability, we need the high-level path planner in the navigation system to be aware of the walking capabilities of the low-level locomotion policy on varying terrains. We achieve this by using proprioceptive feedback to estimate the safe operating limits of the walking policy, and to sense unexpected obstacles and terrain properties like smoothness or softness of the ground that may be missed by vision. The navigation system uses onboard cameras to generate an occupancy map and a corresponding cost map to reach the goal. The FMM (Fast Marching Method) planner then generates a target path. The velocity command generator takes this as input to generate the desired velocity for the locomotion policy using as input additional constraints, from the safety advisor, of unexpected obstacles and terrain determined speed limits. We show superior performance compared to wheeled robot (LoCoBot) baselines, and other baselines which have disjoint high-level planning and low-level control. We also show the real-world deployment of our system on a quadruped robot with onboard sensors and compute. Videos at //navigation-locomotion.github.io/camera-ready
Coordinating inverters at scale under uncertainty is the desideratum for integrating renewables in distribution grids. Unless load demands and solar generation are telemetered frequently, controlling inverters given approximate grid conditions or proxies thereof becomes a key specification. Although deep neural networks (DNNs) can learn optimal inverter schedules, guaranteeing feasibility is largely elusive. Rather than training DNNs to imitate already computed optimal power flow (OPF) solutions, this work integrates DNN-based inverter policies into the OPF. The proposed DNNs are trained through two OPF alternatives that confine voltage deviations on the average and as a convex restriction of chance constraints. The trained DNNs can be driven by partial, noisy, or proxy descriptors of the current grid conditions. This is important when OPF has to be solved for an unobservable feeder. DNN weights are trained via back-propagation and upon differentiating the AC power flow equations assuming the network model is known. Otherwise, a gradient-free variant is put forth. The latter is relevant when inverters are controlled by an aggregator having access only to a power flow solver or a digital twin of the feeder. Numerical tests compare the DNN-based inverter control schemes with the optimal inverter setpoints in terms of optimality and feasibility.
In this paper, we propose an inverse-kinematics controller for a class of multi-robot systems in the scenario of sampled communication. The goal is to make a group of robots perform trajectory tracking {in a coordinated way} when the sampling time of communications is non-negligible, disrupting the theoretical convergence guarantees of standard control designs. Given a feasible desired trajectory in the configuration space, the proposed controller receives measurements from the system at sampled time instants and computes velocity references for the robots, which are tracked by a low-level controller. We propose a jointly designed feedback plus feedforward controller with provable stability and error convergence guarantees, and further show that the obtained controller is amenable of decentralized implementation. We test the proposed control strategy via numerical simulations in the scenario of cooperative aerial manipulation of a cable-suspended load using a realistic simulator (Fly-Crane). Finally, we compare our proposed decentralized controller with centralized approaches that adapt the feedback gain online through smart heuristics, and show that it achieves comparable performance.
We propose a novel approach for fast and accurate stereo visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) independent of feature detection and matching. We extend monocular Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) to a stereo system by optimizing the scale of the 3D points to minimize photometric error for the stereo configuration, which yields a computationally efficient and robust method compared to conventional stereo matching. We further extend it to a full SLAM system with loop closure to reduce accumulated errors. With the assumption of forward camera motion, we imitate a LiDAR scan using the 3D points obtained from the visual odometry and adapt a LiDAR descriptor for place recognition to facilitate more efficient detection of loop closures. Afterward, we estimate the relative pose using direct alignment by minimizing the photometric error for potential loop closures. Optionally, further improvement over direct alignment is achieved by using the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. Lastly, we optimize a pose graph to improve SLAM accuracy globally. By avoiding feature detection or matching in our SLAM system, we ensure high computational efficiency and robustness. Thorough experimental validations on public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as self-evidencing beings that act to fulfill their optimistic predictions, namely preferred outcomes or goals. In contrast, reinforcement learning requires human-designed rewards to accomplish any desired outcome. Although active inference could provide a more natural self-supervised objective for control, its applicability has been limited because of the shortcomings in scaling the approach to complex environments. In this work, we propose a contrastive objective for active inference that strongly reduces the computational burden in learning the agent's generative model and planning future actions. Our method performs notably better than likelihood-based active inference in image-based tasks, while also being computationally cheaper and easier to train. We compare to reinforcement learning agents that have access to human-designed reward functions, showing that our approach closely matches their performance. Finally, we also show that contrastive methods perform significantly better in the case of distractors in the environment and that our method is able to generalize goals to variations in the background.
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, in continuous state and actions spaces and a Gaussian policy -- common in computer animation and robotics -- PPO is prone to getting stuck in local optima. In this paper, we observe a tendency of PPO to prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which naturally leads to slow progress. Motivated by this, we borrow ideas from CMA-ES, a black-box optimization method designed for intelligent adaptive Gaussian exploration, to derive PPO-CMA, a novel proximal policy optimization approach that can expand the exploration variance on objective function slopes and shrink the variance when close to the optimum. This is implemented by using separate neural networks for policy mean and variance and training the mean and variance in separate passes. Our experiments demonstrate a clear improvement over vanilla PPO in many difficult OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks.
Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian's trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.
In this work, we take a representation learning perspective on hierarchical reinforcement learning, where the problem of learning lower layers in a hierarchy is transformed into the problem of learning trajectory-level generative models. We show that we can learn continuous latent representations of trajectories, which are effective in solving temporally extended and multi-stage problems. Our proposed model, SeCTAR, draws inspiration from variational autoencoders, and learns latent representations of trajectories. A key component of this method is to learn both a latent-conditioned policy and a latent-conditioned model which are consistent with each other. Given the same latent, the policy generates a trajectory which should match the trajectory predicted by the model. This model provides a built-in prediction mechanism, by predicting the outcome of closed loop policy behavior. We propose a novel algorithm for performing hierarchical RL with this model, combining model-based planning in the learned latent space with an unsupervised exploration objective. We show that our model is effective at reasoning over long horizons with sparse rewards for several simulated tasks, outperforming standard reinforcement learning methods and prior methods for hierarchical reasoning, model-based planning, and exploration.
Visual object tracking is an important computer vision problem with numerous real-world applications including human-computer interaction, autonomous vehicles, robotics, motion-based recognition, video indexing, surveillance and security. In this paper, we aim to extensively review the latest trends and advances in the tracking algorithms and evaluate the robustness of trackers in the presence of noise. The first part of this work comprises a comprehensive survey of recently proposed tracking algorithms. We broadly categorize trackers into correlation filter based trackers and the others as non-correlation filter trackers. Each category is further classified into various types of trackers based on the architecture of the tracking mechanism. In the second part of this work, we experimentally evaluate tracking algorithms for robustness in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise. Multiple levels of additive noise are added to the Object Tracking Benchmark (OTB) 2015, and the precision and success rates of the tracking algorithms are evaluated. Some algorithms suffered more performance degradation than others, which brings to light a previously unexplored aspect of the tracking algorithms. The relative rank of the algorithms based on their performance on benchmark datasets may change in the presence of noise. Our study concludes that no single tracker is able to achieve the same efficiency in the presence of noise as under noise-free conditions; thus, there is a need to include a parameter for robustness to noise when evaluating newly proposed tracking algorithms.
Cloud Robotics is one of the emerging area of robotics. It has created a lot of attention due to its direct practical implications on Robotics. In Cloud Robotics, the concept of cloud computing is used to offload computational extensive jobs of the robots to the cloud. Apart from this, additional functionalities can also be offered on run to the robots on demand. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the computational intensive algorithm in robotics used by robots for navigation and map building in an unknown environment. Several Cloud based frameworks are proposed specifically to address the problem of SLAM, DAvinCi, Rapyuta and C2TAM are some of those framework. In this paper, we presented a detailed review of all these framework implementation for SLAM problem.